


Coping Mechanism

by lepidolite



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Aftermath, Angst, F/M, Gen, implied assault, introspective
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-02-10
Updated: 2013-02-10
Packaged: 2017-11-28 20:13:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,489
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/678452
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lepidolite/pseuds/lepidolite
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Lydia Martin is fine.</p><p>Really.</p><p>(Not really.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Coping Mechanism

It starts out small.

 

 _I am fine,_ Lydia writes in a spare notebook. Her writing is neat. Perfect.

 

It gets her through the day, through the whispers and glances, through all the places that she saw him when he was in her head, through maintaining a perfect smirking mask so long that it almost hurts.

 

_I am fine._

 

* * *

 

 

Allison doesn't really talk any more. She still sneaks longing looks in Scott's direction when he's turned away, and makes a reasonable attempt at her homework, and comes to the mall for shopping trips, and yet she's never quite the same as she used to be. Allison's just not as good at hiding as Lydia is.

 

And really, when her crazy relations were training her, they should have been better at teaching her how to resist interrogation. It had been embarrassingly easy to get it out off her.

_(“...I've done some bad things lately...” Allison didn't meet her eyes for a long time, obviously terrified of losing her too.)_

 

So, yeah. She knows about all the werewolf/kanima/hunter bullshit now. Piece by piece, she pried the knowledge out of her friends using her iron-plated determination like a crowbar. It was jarring to hear all the times that she had been so manipulated, so close to death, and everyone around her had known and just hadn't told her. Even after she had been _ripped apart_ by a _werewolf_ , even when she was so obviously fucked up by him that she couldn't tell whether or not what she was seeing was real, they left her out of the loop.

 

A part of her thinks that she should want to throw a proper tantrum like she hadn't since she was eight, or just employ all of her powers of biting mockery that she had developed since then, but.

 

But.

 

But Allison is so quiet, filled to the brim with betrayal and guilt at her own betrayal (and near murder) of people that trusted her, that she rarely smiles honestly any more. When she does it's like sunshine blooming out from between storm clouds, and just as brilliant and brief. Every day that Erica and Boyd remain missing the space between smiles grows wider.

 

But Jackson had actually _killed people_ while being controlled by the local psychopaths, and was only now dealing with being a werewolf. They hold each other when no-one is around and everything is suffocatingly silent: both pretend that they aren't trembling.

 

But everyone is fucked up too, and she's too tired and aching from dealing with everything she doesn't have the heart. So she smiles, tosses her hair, employs her Alpha Bitch persona just enough to deflect suspicion, and makes a note on her phone:

 

_I am fine._

* * *

 

 

She feels sick all the time. Like... like inside of her is something dirty, or wrong, and she can't get it out.

 

( _Maybe she's the one that's wrong._ )

 

The feeling builds and builds until she ends up running out of second period English, hand clamped over her mouth, and to the nearest bathroom. She barely makes it in a stall before she empties her stomach. Bile and pained sobs still burning her throat, she flushes, then leans back against the partition.

 

Briefly, she wondered if she could expel him from her system the same way, just purge away the memory of his touch like a sickness. Then she steels against this, straightens even through roiling feeling in her gut.

No. She can be more than this. _I am_ _Lydia Martin, and Lydia Martin is strong._

 

Mentally, she makes a tally mark; a reminder. _I am fine._

* * *

 

Things with Stiles have reached a strange kind of plateau.

 

It's clear that he thinks he loved her.

 

Still loves her.

 

Whatever.

 

He still looks at her like she's some kind of goddess, up on a pedestal she helped construct. He almost gave her a flat-screen tv for her birthday, for god's sake.

 

He had always been like that, she vaguely remembered. That scrawny tall kid on the edges of her periphery, just another guy who didn't know her but thought he wanted to. It had always been, at once, annoying and flattering: yet another person knew she was amazing, but it was some weirdo who just wouldn't _leave her alone._

 

It's weird now, though, because he's not just another nameless ( _“What the hell is a 'Stiles'?”_ ) boy in the background. They're pretty much friends. She actually likes him. And it's because she likes him that this in-between state is so awkward. He still jokes about his many-stepped plans to gain her heart, still pays more attention to her than he probably should, still looks at her like she's the source of all creation, but it's all with an undertone of resignation. Finally, he's beginning to see that a 'goddess' like her is never going to love him back.

 

Lydia is finding that she doesn't want to be on a pedestal. She wants the people she cares about to see her as the human she is and still want to be around her ( _like Jackson does, like he always has_ ), not as some symbol, some perfect object to be idolised and admired.

 

There are jars and bottles of lotions and oils and creams lined neatly across her vanity table. The newest group display the same smooth thread of advertisement: _you'll look beautiful, you'll look perfect, you'll look normal, you'll look_ _ **better**_ _than normal, no-one will ever see that you're not if you just use this product._

 

Well.

 

They all mean that, don't they?

 

_Make me not what I am._

 

Lydia touches the edges of the raised skin of a scar, shiny-dark against her pale stomach. With light, perfectly manicured fingers, she traces invisible words into her skin:

 

_I am fine._

 

* * *

 

There's a strange soft edge to how she and Jackson act around each other.

 

She loves him, beauty and the beast levels of love, evidently, but with that comes fear. She is deathly afraid of losing him. Whether it was to this new, supernatural thing they had got caught up in (well, she was caught. He shoved his way in, and damn the consequences) or to mundane reasons, it always feels like he is seconds away from being yanked away. He feels it too. It's there in how they move together, his arms tight around her as if worried she will dissipate into mist.

 

They both had held their walls with such pride throughout their whole relationship, unwilling to give away their advantage over the other. Even now ( _especially now_ ), after they had bared their hearts in a filthy warehouse after he had _died,_ they kept up their private stupid war.

 

But it's different, now. What had been seen as surrender, as weakness, now seemed closer to an armistace. Their battlements still stood, but they no longer tried to tried to destroy them, They were allowed through to eachother's heart, anyway; why should they?

 

Winning seemed so pointless. And not very much like winning at all.

 

* * *

 

They find Erica and Boyd.

 

It's... not pretty.

 

Then everything goes to shit.

 

The next two years are the longest and bloodiest that Lydia will ever experience.

* * *

 

Packing is, has been, and always will be horribly tedious and stressful. Lydia had taken _hours_ to whittle down her plentiful belongings to just a few boxes and suitcases. They wouldn't even need a very large mover's truck, she was leaving _that much_ behind in the attic. She is just reaching into the very back of her wardrobe's highest shelf when she freezes.

 

There, tucked safe underneath an old jewellery box, is a neat little notebook. She lifts it out. Every few pages there is a line of ripped paper where a leaf had been torn out completely. Besides this, the only thing the notebook contains within its covers are three words, immaculately printed, over and over and over.

 

She lifts a hand to her mouth. A strange noise escapes; a kind of half-laugh, half-sob. She flips page after page, seeing those words repeated end on end like a mantra. Through everything she and the others had overcome, through losing people and battles and ground, this notebook had been a kind of reverse confession of weakness. The frequency of her entries had dwindled with time; in the end, she had forgotten it completely. She feels worlds away from that scared and shaken girl.

 

From her jacket pocket she pulls the large marker she had used for labelling boxes, and scrawled messily near the back of the book. The ink seeps through, staining her old mantra with eight new words.

 

She drops the notebook in a black garbage bag with a satisfied smile. She has made it. She's survived high school with her limbs and sanity mostly intact, and is now entering the brave new world of tertiary education.

 

And she doesn't need this any more.

 

_I am not fine. But I will be._

 


End file.
